{"id":119,"date":"2006-06-05T17:45:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T21:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/?p=119"},"modified":"2013-07-02T12:01:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T16:01:45","slug":"eric-alexander-and-unction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/?p=119","title":{"rendered":"Eric Alexander and Unction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the recent pastors&#8217; luncheon in Memphis I <a href=\"http:\/\/rvanneste.blogspot.com\/2006\/05\/united-at-justification.html\">mentioned previously<\/a>, I had a number of good conversations. One was with a pastor who told me about a fairly recent conversation he had with Eric Alexander, the Scottish preacher regarded by many as one of the great preachers of our era. The man with whom I spoke expressed to Alexander his appreciation saying, &#8220;When I hear you preach I sense the real presence of God.&#8221;\u009d Alexander thanked him saying, &#8220;That is something for which I have prayed all my ministry.&#8221;<br \/>\nI thought that this was a humble way to receive such a compliment and a good encouragement to pray regularly for the Lord&#8217;s blessing on our preaching, for what the Puritans called &#8220;unction.&#8221; We must labor to understand the text and to express it well; but, then it all depends on the Lord&#8217;s blessing of our labors to take His word and apply it powerfully to the hearts and minds of men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the recent pastors&#8217; luncheon in Memphis I mentioned previously, I had a number of good conversations. One was with a pastor who told me about a fairly recent conversation he had with Eric Alexander, the Scottish preacher regarded by many as one of the great preachers of our era. The man with whom I &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/?p=119\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading &lsquo;Eric Alexander and Unction&rsquo; &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3788,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/3788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}